Jeffrey Wasserman, 59, Creator Of Colorfully Abstract Paintings

By KEN JOHNSON

Published: July 7, 2006

Jeffrey Wasserman, a painter who became known in New York in the 1980's for his buoyant, vividly colorful and poetically suggestive abstractions, died Sunday at his home in Millerton, N.Y. He was 59.

The cause was cancer, said his wife, Anne Newburg.

Mr. Wasserman was what admirers call a painter's painter. He was among SoHo's early loft-dwelling artists in the 70's, and he participated in the efflorescence of the East Village scene in the early 80's. His friends included influential postmodernists like Jeff Koons, Peter Halley and Saint Clair Cemin.

His paintings, made with a loose, spontaneous touch in thin layers, featured elemental shapes, arabesque forms and archetypal symbols folded into layered, luminously colored spaces. Though related to the works of earlier modernists like Joan Mir?ans Hofmann and the Abstract Expressionists, his work was also in sympathy with the playful, pluralistic spirit of the late 70's and early 80's, and he was frequently included in group shows devoted to contemporary abstraction.

Jeffrey Andrew Wasserman was born on July 21, 1946, in Mount Vernon, N.Y. As a teenager, he studied with the Color Field painter Friedel Dzubas, and he went on to earn a B.F.A. degree from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. He did graduate work in painting at the Royal College of Art in London.

Mr. Wasserman's first solo exhibition, at the Municipal Theater in Caen, France, in 1980, was organized by Philippe Briet, who later had a gallery in New York at which Mr. Wasserman had another one-person show. From 1984 to 1995, he had four solo shows in New York, the last at Bill Maynes Contemporary Art.

Besides his wife, he is survived by a daughter, Jane, and a son, Hugo.